Optimised Design and Analysis of All-Optical Networks

This PhD thesis presents a suite of methods for optimising design and for analysing blocking probabilities of all-optical networks. It thus contributes methodical knowledge to the field of computer assisted planning of optical networks. A two-stage greenfield optical network design optimiser is developed, based on shortest-path algorithms and a comparatively new metaheuristic called simulated allocation. It is able to handle design of all-optical mesh networks with optical cross-connects, considers duct as well as fibre and node costs, and can also design protected networks. The method is assessed through various experiments and is shown to produce good results and to be able to scale up to networks of realistic sizes. A novel method, subpath wavelength grouping, for routing connections in a multigranular all-optical network where several wavelengths can be grouped and switched at band and fibre level is presented. The method uses an unorthodox routing strategy focusing on common subpaths rather than individual connections, and strives to minimise switch port count as well as fibre usage. It is shown to produce cheaper network designs than previous methods when fibre costs are comparatively high. A new optical network concept, the synchronous optical hierarchy, is proposed, in which wavelengths are subdivided into timeslots to match the traffic granularity. Various theoretical properties of this concept are investigated and compared in simulation studies. An integer linear programming model for optical ring network design is presented. Manually designed real world ring networks are studied and it is found that the model can lead to cheaper network design. Moreover, ring and mesh network architectures are compared using real world costs, and it is found that optical cros..

A survey on OFDM-based elastic core optical networking

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation technology that has been widely adopted in many new and emerging broadband wireless and wireline communication systems. Due to its capability to transmit a high-speed data stream using multiple spectral-overlapped lower-speed subcarriers, OFDM technology offers superior advantages of high spectrum efficiency, robustness against inter-carrier and inter-symbol interference, adaptability to server channel conditions, etc. In recent years, there have been intensive studies on optical OFDM (O-OFDM) transmission technologies, and it is considered a promising technology for future ultra-high-speed optical transmission. Based on O-OFDM technology, a novel elastic optical network architecture with immense flexibility and scalability in spectrum allocation and data rate accommodation could be built to support diverse services and the rapid growth of Internet traffic in the future. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on OFDM-based elastic optical network technologies, including basic principles of OFDM, O-OFDM technologies, the architectures of OFDM-based elastic core optical networks, and related key enabling technologies. The main advantages and issues of OFDM-based elastic core optical networks that are under research are also discussed

Design And Analysis Of Effective Routing And Channel Scheduling For Wavelength Division Multiplexing Optical Networks

Optical networking, employing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), is seen as the technology of the future for the Internet. This dissertation investigates several important problems affecting optical circuit switching (OCS) and optical burst switching (OBS) networks. Novel algorithms and new approaches to improve the performance of these networks through effective routing and channel scheduling are presented. Extensive simulations and analytical modeling have both been used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in achieving lower blocking probability, better fairness as well as faster switching. The simulation tests were performed over a variety of optical network topologies including the ring and mesh topologies, the U.S. Long-Haul topology, the Abilene high-speed optical network used in Internet 2, the Toronto Metropolitan topology and the European Optical topology. Optical routing protocols previously published in the literature have largely ignored the noise and timing jitter accumulation caused by cascading several wavelength conversions along the lightpath of the data burst. This dissertation has identified and evaluated a new constraint, called the wavelength conversion cascading constraint. According to this constraint, the deployment of wavelength converters in future optical networks will be constrained by a bound on the number of wavelength conversions that a signal can go through when it is switched all-optically from the source to the destination. Extensive simulation results have conclusively demonstrated that the presence of this constraint causes significant performance deterioration in existing routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) algorithms. Higher blocking probability and/or worse fairness have been observed for existing RWA algorithms when the cascading constraint is not ignored. To counteract the negative side effect of the cascading constraint, two constraint-aware routing algorithms are proposed for OCS networks: the desirable greedy algorithm and the weighted adaptive algorithm. The two algorithms perform source routing using link connectivity and the global state information of each wavelength. Extensive comparative simulation results have illustrated that by limiting the negative cascading impact to the minimum extent practicable, the proposed approaches can dramatically decrease the blocking probability for a variety of optical network topologies. The dissertation has developed a suite of three fairness-improving adaptive routing algorithms in OBS networks. The adaptive routing schemes consider the transient link congestion at the moment when bursts arrive and use this information to reduce the overall burst loss probability. The proposed schemes also resolve the intrinsic unfairness defect of existing popular signaling protocols. The extensive simulation results have shown that the proposed schemes generally outperform the popular shortest path routing algorithm and the improvement could be substantial. A two-dimensional Markov chain analytical model has also been developed and used to analyze the burst loss probabilities for symmetrical ring networks. The accuracy of the model has been validated by simulation. Effective proactive routing and preemptive channel scheduling have also been proposed to address the conversion cascading constraint in OBS environments. The proactive routing adapts the fairness-improving adaptive routing mentioned earlier to the environment of cascaded wavelength conversions. On the other hand, the preemptive channel scheduling approach uses a dynamic priority for each burst based on the constraint threshold and the current number of performed wavelength conversions. Empirical results have proved that when the cascading constraint is present, both approaches would not only decrease the burst loss rates greatly, but also improve the transmission fairness among bursts with different hop counts to a large extent

Control Plane Hardware Design for Optical Packet Switched Data Centre Networks

Optical packet switching for intra-data centre networks is key to addressing traffic requirements. Photonic integration and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) can overcome bandwidth limits in switching systems. A promising technology to build a nanosecond-reconfigurable photonic-integrated switch, compatible with WDM, is the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). SOAs are typically used as gating elements in a broadcast-and-select (B\&S) configuration, to build an optical crossbar switch. For larger-size switching, a three-stage Clos network, based on crossbar nodes, is a viable architecture. However, the design of the switch control plane, is one of the barriers to packet switching; it should run on packet timescales, which becomes increasingly challenging as line rates get higher. The scheduler, used for the allocation of switch paths, limits control clock speed. To this end, the research contribution was the design of highly parallel hardware schedulers for crossbar and Clos network switches. On a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), the minimum scheduler clock period achieved was 5.0~ns and 5.4~ns, for a 32-port crossbar and Clos switch, respectively. By using parallel path allocation modules, one per Clos node, a minimum clock period of 7.0~ns was achieved, for a 256-port switch. For scheduler application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) synthesis, this reduces to 2.0~ns; a record result enabling scalable packet switching. Furthermore, the control plane was demonstrated experimentally. Moreover, a cycle-accurate network emulator was developed to evaluate switch performance. Results showed a switch saturation throughput at a traffic load 60\% of capacity, with sub-microsecond packet latency, for a 256-port Clos switch, outperforming state-of-the-art optical packet switches

Heuristic for Lowering Electricity Costs for Routing in Optical Data Center Networks

Optical data centers consume a large quantity of energy and the cost of that energy has a significant contribution to the operational cost in data centers. The amount of electricity consumption in data centers and their related costs are increasing day by day. Data centers are geographically distributed all around the continents and the growing numbers of data replicas have made it possible to find more cost effective network routing. Besides flat-rate prices, today, there are companies which offers real-time pricing. In order to address the energy consumption cost problem, we propose an energy efficient routing scheme to find least cost path to the replicas based on real-time pricing model called energy price aware routing (EPAR). Our research considers anycast data transmission model to find the suitable replica as well as the fixed window traffic allocation model for demand request to reduce the energy consumption cost of data center networks

An ant-based algorithm for distributed routing and wavelength assignment in dynamic optical networks

Future optical communication networks are expected to change radically during the next decade. To meet the demanded bandwidth requirements, more dynamism, scalability and automatism will need to be provided. This will also require addressing issues such as the design of highly distributed control plane systems and their associated algorithms to respond to network changes very rapidly. In this work, we propose the use of an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm to solve the intrinsic problem of the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) on wavelength continuity constraint optical networks. The main advantage of the protocol is its distributed nature, which provides higher survivability to network failures or traffic congestion. The protocol has been applied to a specific type of future optical network based on the optical switching of bursts. It has been evaluated through extensive simulations with very promising results, particularly on highly congested scenarios where the load balancing capabilities of the protocol become especially efficient. Results on a partially meshed network like NSFNET show that the ant-based protocol outperforms other RWA algorithms under test in terms of blocking probability without worsening other metrics such as mean route length.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version